2/28/2012

I don't recall a game that really rewarded it's player base for participating in betas.

Wakfu had a few interesting incentives for extra-curricular participation in the beta including:- gear and titles for reporting bugs via a 10 point system- a Wakfu haiku contest

As a freemium mmo, it also rewarded the people who bought subscriptions (very reasonable!) with more in-game gear, titles and perks.

Besides having the ability to reserve one name for the launch (the most important thing to me, imho), SquareEnix also gave this reward for participating in the beta:Head over to the site for more information; basically if you loved Final Fantasy Tactics, you'll probably like Wakfu as well!

2/15/2012

Lets first talk about the Things I like about Wakfu, b/c it is easy to complain but harder to praise.

Rich lore detail in some areas- whenever you want to learn a new profession (gathering/crafting), you are given a book that teaches you about how the skill works. To be able to use that skill though, you must first be tested on it via multiple choice. Getting even one wrong will result in failure and requires you to redo the test. - when you do pass and get the skill, you can access that book again (incase you just did trial and error) through the skill screen

Combat Strategy - no longer a spam-fest, its important to take note of monster's weaknesses and eliminate monsters as fast as possible, especially if they're buffed

Changing environment- (nearly) all resources can be grown, harvested, replanted or eliminated. I can't remember the last mmo that looked different the next time you logged in. Per prior screenshots, if you cut down a tree for lumber, if no one else plants a new one, it stays gone forever.

Anime Theme- some will hate it, especially the cutesy stuff, but if you like animes, the graphics and characters are really funny. Like even right at the beginning, there is a fat cat that guards a trapdoor from heaven to the earth. If you stay around and pay attention, he meows and periodically passes gas and you see he is very embarrassed by it.

Things that require improvement...

No Vendors

- at all. So.. no more selling trash items. It feels very weird to not have money in the early parts of the game. The entire economy is a player economy, one that I haven't witnessed and truly hope it will be effective.

Cursor Tooltip needs improvement- it needs to pull up the information a bit faster, for cases when you target an enemy mob, it takes a while for the tooltip to come up and see how many is in the group. Sometimes by time it pulls up, they've moved and you cannot attack them yet- same thing with combat; the tooltip info comes up far too slowly (if at all), and when you target a creature in the initiative bar, it doesn't show you which one you targeted on the battlefield (makes it confusing when you're fighting similar-looking mobs)

Limited information in some areas- I attribute this b/c this is a sandbox game, but I really miss the WoW guards. I don't know where any crafting stations are and as a result spend alot of frustrating minutes running around. Worst thing is, I sometimes still can't find the crafting station.

Perpetual Darkness- there is a day and night cycle in the game, and I think it follows actual day and night in real life. Unfortunately, whenever I log in, its at night, meaning i'm playing during the night in the game. I've yet to seen what it looks like during the daytime. This would be a bigger disadvantage if certain events/mob spawns during the time of day that i'm not on.

2/14/2012

I imagine when Wakfu officially releases at the end of the month that we'll find out how viable crafting will be. I've found that the beginner areas to be sparsely populated and the resources in the area to be plentiful. One thing that i've had to figure out on my own, thanks to Wiki's (and no thanks to the weak official site), is what gathering skills are 'mostly' required for the crafting skills. Below is my initial analysis with the caveat that this is only beta and there MUST be many more hidden and unreleased recipes for it looks like there are less than 20 craftable items per skill.

2/08/2012

But looks like for the rest of the blogosphere, not for you.Bioware did a great job and i'm just being a bit playful when saying it failed b/c it did a great job.

For an mmo that seemed to concentrate on personal stories with countless in-game conversations and dialogue trees, it certainly raised the bar for storytelling. Probably what I liked best about TOR, it made you care about what your character was about and who you travelled (companion) with.

As a Sith Inquisitor, there were countless times I roleplayed a kind Sith/Revanite, when it probably would have been easier to be naturally cruel and dominant. My Imperial Agent (Sniper) was all about doing what he wanted, being a flirt and being a space ace. Unfortunately Kaliyo is bi-polar and very hard to read, resulting in frequently failed dialogues. Being impulsive (greedy yet merciful unless being pushed around) resulted in alot of darkside points.. but looking in the mirror scared me to be a bit nicer and appear less corrupted. My bounty hunter was all about honor, mercy and money which was normally about lightside points but I couldn't see my face b/c it was covered by (normally) nice-looking helmets. I showered my heal-bot Mako with countless technology-related gifts which gave me a quest for Nar Shaddaa.. which appeared to be bugged.

I enjoyed playing my Sith Assassin b/c he was able to stealth and will always remember the time I was in a Balmorran droid factory and smartly told my gf to wait while I jumped down a shaft to explore. The place was crawling with high level champion droids. Thanks to stealth, i carefully made my way back up without dying.

The Sniper got the farthest; Alderaan. It was incredibly tough to keep Kaliyo geared; maybe its b/c no one was healing her, but even fights against 3 weak creatures, she'd come away with only a quarter life left. She frequently died, especially when fighting bosses. The only character to play pvp, I could see it being a good class to play pvp when specced correctly, though difficult with the current way the cover system works.

The Powertech bounty hunter was fun, but could see it wouldn't be too good in pvp as it seemed like most abilites required me to be stationary which isn't usually a good idea. I loved Mako, always keeping me up.. kinda found her two speccs (healing or dps) a bit silly as neither gave too big a bonus. Probably the only companion that I associated with; she was loyal to her friends but also liked making a profit. Was specced to lower heat periodically which resulted in never overheating again; best specc ever.

Storyline isn't everything though; the same things that bothered be at the beginning, continued to the end without any attention/patching. PvP without tiers was kind of stupid imho; sure it allowed you to play with your friends ... unless they were already lvl 50. The rewards for pvp though good, didn't have a big enough effect; WAR had the ability to take keeps and storm your enemy's capital city sometimes restricting your own access. THAT was interesting. Isn't there supposed to be a war between Jedi and Sith? Sure, but only in instanced areas.. or if you consider Illum's zone control swapping 'pvp.' I think when I saw the youtube video of Jedi and Sith taking turns to be slaughtered to get zone control points, I lost all respect for pvp. Not to mention Huttball... which.. is just silly.

Other things that was too annoying for me for a triple A mmo was the stacking of items and companion follow distance. Seemingly small things, they are actually important to an mmo to me. How does the game not know to smartly put similar items into the same stack? And as I said before, the companions stood too close resulting on clicking on them instead of the corpse to loot. Of course it could be the opposite, like in Skyrim where you are attacking a creature and expect your companion to help when they are nowhere to be found. Or when you lose them completely and can't get them back, the follow distance for Skyrim was flawed as well. Bioware did good in some respects for follow distance but like Neverwinter Nights, I'd prefer to set the distance between close, medium or far.

So thats it? Storyline-centric, stacking and follow distance breaks the game for me?I never really intended on TOR to be my main interest; Guild Wars 2 was supposed to be it and I didn't even plan on trying TOR. TOR does a respectable job but 'respectable' doesn't carry everyone's interest forever.

ps. Kudos for good looking non-human races (Chiss, Twi'lek) but I don't like the jumping puzzles for Holocrons

2/01/2012

I was just thinking about last night's game session in SW:TOR with my Imperial Agent and made the connection between the game and real life in whether they got the idea of an elite terror cell that trains in a desert from Afghanistan.

Convenient that in Tatooine there is a terrorist cell who is assisted by the locals to repel the occupying 'invaders.'

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And I hate the sand people.. just because. Giving me a quest to reward shedding their blood is just icing on the cake.

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Modding gear becomes quite involved when a significant part of both you and your companion's gear is moddable. I guess like any mmo, you strongest/highest lvl character will have weaker gear at the same level as newer characters b/c they have to go through the growing pains of leveling their crafting skill. Once that skill is leveled, the gear can be given and used by alts that reach the appropriate requirement right away, instead of possibly 1-3 levels too late.

That being said, Kaliyo really needs better gear.. her armor seems paper-thin and we always need to rest, even when fighting groups of weak creatures.

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I got camped by my first lvl 50 last night while questing in Tatooine. I realize its my own fault picking a pvp server and that its inevitable that ill get ganked.. so I wasn't upset when it happened. I was subsequently corpse camped.. and my intelligence doubted when he tried to stay outside of sight, waiting for me to respawn. I did eventually respawn to finish my quest and knew he'd be hot on my tails so I ran into an exhaustion zone to deprive him of a satisfying kill.